Archive for the ‘The Economy’ Category

I love sports. Pro football, basketball and baseball. The breeding ground for basketball and football is the college campus, and while there have been many discussions regarding what exactly defines a college athlete, and should they be compensated beyond room, board and tuition, that remains a work-in-progress.

A recent quote from Washington Redskins wide receiver, DeSean Jackson, almost made me lose my lunch. Now keep in mind, Jackson attended the University of California at Berkeley. Cal as it is better known, has been touted as the finest public institution in the world. Yes they have a football team, and apparently they look the other way when it comes to admissions for these players.

“I don’t feel no pressure, man. I been feeling pressure since I was a little kid walking down the street in Crenshaw.”

Really? Berkeley? 3 years at Berkeley?

I really have no problem with schools letting in premier athletes at a lower standard than the average student, but if a school does adopt this practice, make the kid attend school and help the poor guy or gal speak properly as to not embarrass themselves and the school. Most of these kids will never turn pro, let along get quoted by ESPN.

DeSean Jackson, Cal. There are 1000’s more just like Jackson who got screwed by their respective colleges because they lost their NCAA eligibility to suit up.

Make a scholarship just that. Put the kids on a path to graduate – regardless of eligibility. Yes, they received tuition, but they also tore knee ligaments, broke fibulas and got concussions – all to get the school’s name and mascot across the bottom of the screen on ESPN, Fox and Comcast.

It takes one college to step up and start this….Cal? Stanford? Iowa State?

In my constant quest to piss off die-hard union workers that sap our city, county, state and federal budgets with their lifetime paycheck entitlement mentality, I applaud the state of Michigan for their right-to-work stance.

The Wall Street Journal had a brief editorial on the matter, that I would love to share:

“Unions can extract monopoly wages and benefits for a time from a profitable industry, but often at the cost of making that industry less competitive and eventually at the cost of union jobs. Thus did Teamster work rules — cake and bread had to be delivered in separate trucks — cost the bakery workers their jobs at Hostess.”

I had touched on the union costing Americans and fans around the world Twinkies, but when the truth comes out that cake and bread could not reside on the same delivery truck, good riddance. The brands will resurface from another company in the next year and workers will find work, and the unions will have another nail in the collective coffins.

Wonder Bread, Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos are dead and 18,000 people are out of work, as a union strike has killed Hostess.

Once again, unions try and bleed a company and do not understand a company needs to adapt to meet competition, and in this case, their greed cost everyone on the payroll and Twinkies fans all over the world.

Unions kill Twinkies and Wonder Bread, 18,000 jobs lost

The strike essentially shut down Hostess production for an extended period, and with no cashflow, there are no paychecks. Hostess couldn’t ramp up production and has decided to file for bankruptcy and sell off their products to the highest bidder.

Grocery stores are competing with Target and Wal-Mart who now sell milk and eggs and are non-union, leaving specialty stores as the only grocers who can charge a premium for their products and support union-scale wages.

Union leaders must be proud they stood up to “The Man” and held their ground, and union members surely feel good today as they backed union leaders who had their best interests in mind.

America is prejudiced. Americans do not like Mormons, that must be the explanation for Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.

Mormons are a cult. They have dozens of wives. They don’t drink coffee, beer or wine. Utah is cold in the winter, and Robert Redford lives there. I never liked Donny and Marie Osmond.

These are some of the excuses, with the words changed, if Obama had lost the election yesterday. “The black guy had his chance,” Tom the Mechanic, from upstate Iowa, stated as part of his explanation of voting Republican, after supporting Obama in 2008.

Of course, this is in jest, but the reality was, Mitt Romney didn’t click with America. Whether it was the prep school upbringing, never having a Budweiser at a football game, the religion that most of America looks at with some level of suspicion, or his lack of cajones in pouncing on Obama during the debate over the Libya coverup when Obama danced deftly around the question about embassy security.

He should have said, “Mr. President, can you just answer the damn question? We all know the ambassadors work hard, but can you please explain why he is now dead?”

America needs a new Ronald Reagan. One born in the 1960’s or 1970’s. We need a leader who came up through the ranks, who relied on student loans and hard work to pay for his or her education. 2016 will be wide open for new ideas to clean up the preceding eight years of moving toward socialism, taxes and debt.

We’ve all heard that one vote makes a difference, and that is oh-so true in the swing states, and down to the micro level of swing counties. This election can shape not just the next four years, but possibly the next twenty years with all the changes Obama can make as a lame-duck leader with no recourse.

Obama Care is step one. Granting illegal residents the ability to stay in this country with no penalty is another, which can trickle down to the state level where states are considering offering driver’s licenses to the undocumented. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that unfriendly nations send people to Mexico and to then cross the border with the hordes and then find a way to get state-issued identification which would now allow them to board airplanes, interstate buses and enter government buildings?

For those of you who voted for Obama because he seemed cooler and more in touch than John McCain, now is your chance to vote with your brain rather than someone you would like to play a pickup game of hoops with. Mitt Romney has some flaws, no doubt. He went to private schools and has possibly never mowed a lawn or picked out a head of lettuce at the grocery store, so his ability to relate to me and you is close to nil. That said, I don’t have to like my boss or my coach or my leader so long as I believe he or she can do a great job in moving us in the right direction as a country.

Let’s have Obama go down in history as a nice guy who was elected to the highest office, something like Jimmy Carter, but also be remembered for the horrible job they did while in office of not moving the economy in the correct direction and of his unwillingness to reach across the aisle to work together. Obama’s way or the highway has been to common a theme. Let’s change that on November 6th.

Please, Mr. President, raise my taxes so you don’t have to cut entitlements, pensions or waste.

Please raise my taxes so we can continue to send aid checks to countries that hate us.

Please raise my taxes so we can create new government agencies that give jobs and pensions to people who accomplish nothing.

Please raise my taxes so we can pay college tuition for illegal immigrants.

Please raise my taxes so we can pay for medical expenses of family members of non-citizens who can sponsor their parents even though they only hold a green card.

Please raise my taxes so we can continue paying welfare to people who have cashed checks for decades without ever looking for a job.

Please raise my taxes so we can cover growing pension payments for every government aide that has graced the land of the free and home of the brave.

Please raise my taxes so we subsidize corn farmers so we can make ethanol. Never mind that it costs $5.00 per gallon to produce and sells for $3.00.

Please raise my taxes so we can fund another Solyndra.

Doug Edwards, a former Google tech-millionaire, and Obama supporter was apparently OK’d to get up and ask Mr. Obama to raise his taxes, while speaking at a townhall meeting at LinkedIn.com. Since raising taxes has been one of Obama’s goals since he has been in office, and since Edwards has donated large sums of money to Democratic causes in the past, it would not be surprising if he approached the Obama team to pre-qualify the question knowing full well the sound-bite press coverage it would get.

Again, instead of raising taxes for anyone, let’s cut the fat, and let’s start with pensions. I challenge a politician, particularly a Republican politician to announce for the record they will forgo their pension once retired and then have them challenge others and see if it gains any traction.

An interesting tidbit that I just came across: 29-percent of new entrepreneurs in the United States are immigrants.

Truly the land of opportunity, and I see it all day and every day in Silicon Valley. Why is it that other parts of the country cannot get on the bandwagon instead of waiting for Obama-care to take care of them with temp jobs that lead nowhere?

In Silicon Valley we aren’t afraid of failure; it’s a badge of valor – it means you tried. Take your lumps and go for another. Companies fail all the time out here, and there are layoffs as well. Guess where so many of the new brilliant ideas ferment – yes, from laid-off tech geeks.

Politicians have nothing else to do. Never mind the budget overruns, out of whack pensions for public employees or transit systems that are terminally broken. None of these matter as much as stopping me from having my milk put into a bag made from plastic at the grocery store. It started in San Francisco, likely the most dysfunctional city in America, and has filtered south to San Jose, a city where bootleg DVDs and handbags can be found in a dozen ethnic shopping malls around town without a second glance from city hall.

Years ago stores phased out paper bags because they killed trees and plastic was cheaper. Now plastic is evil and paper is coming back, or to some stores, such as Ikea, bags have been eliminated, period. We are supposed to bring a re-usable bags. A bag I am supposed to buy.

Never mind the inconvenience or how I will get 4 gallons of milk upstairs from the garage, plus my groceries. Never mind the cans of green beans rolling around my trunk. Never mind that I now have to buy trash bags – plastic trash bags. Today, I reuse these bags for garbage and recycling, but that is probably evil, too.

grocery-store-plastic-bags-banned

The micro-management of our elected politicians is getting more and more bizarre, and we as a population seem to tolerate this behavior. The silent majority needs to take a stand to the so-called “correct left” and say enough is enough: do something useful like eliminating all government pensions for those who don’t teach our children or risk their life on our behalf so we can stop living in a deficit world.

After I cash my paycheck, that money should be mine. Taxes have been deducted and if I choose to spend that money on a stereo, invest in a penny stock or change everything into $5.00 dollar bills and fill up a mattress, that should be my prerogative.

Of course, this isn’t the case. Interest on my bank account is added to my yearly tax return, any money I earn from selling a stock is taxable income. The government wants to know pretty much what you have and where you put it, which to me, feels like an invasion of privacy.

Flipping through a magazine, I came across an advertisement for private vaults. The ad captured me, “….we won’t ask your name or anything about you.” They use an iris scan, and prices start at $250.00 for a small box, annually. The company, Private Vaults, is located in Las Vegas, and while they have a pretty cheesy looking website, I love the concept.